“Ethnicity is the skeleton of
American religion.” This was Marty’s presidential address to the
American Society of Church History in 1971.

Peoples:
The Thickness of Pluralism

“The story of the peopling of America has not yet
been written. We do not understand ourselves,” complained Frederick Jackson
Turner in 1891.(1) Subsequent immigration history contributed to national self-understanding.
Without ever completely abandoning Turners frontier thesis, which historians
used as far as it went, they added other preoccupations. A century after Turner,
historians were busier with a second chapter in the half-told tale of the peopling
of America. They have concentrated on the story of the regrouping of citizens
along racial, ethnic and religious lines, and of their relations to each other
in movements of what have come to be called “peoplehood.”(2)

Peoplehood and Tribalism

First, the realities of black power, black religion,
black theology and black churchmanship inspired historians of religion in the
1960s to explore hitherto neglected elements in the makeup of spiritual America.
The murder of integrationist leader Martin Luther King and the publication of
separationist Albert Cleage, Jr.s The Black Messiah in 1968 were
signs of a developing sense of “peoplehood” among blacks as well
as of what was called the “religiocification” of a black revolution.
Ties to the African religious past and to other spiritual forces outside America
were regularly stressed: “We must seek out our brothers in all of Asia
and Africa.”(3)

The black revolution triggered or was concurrent with
other expressions of peoplehood. The American Indian frequently stated his case
in religious terms and even provided a metaphor for understanding all the movements:
people came to speak of the presence of “a new tribalism.”(4) Meanwhile,
many Jews resisted being blended into the American mixture. They reinterpreted
their community around two particular historical events, the Holocaust and the
formation of modern Israel; their new self-consciousness resulted in “the
retribalization of the Jew.”(5) This change was accompanied in America
by some retreat from interfaith conversation on the part of Jews and some questioning
as to whether the common “Judeo-Christian tradition” was anything
more than a contrivance. The ghetto walls had largely fallen, but the suburban
Jew had not fully resolved his questions of identity and mission.

“Peoplehood” movements brought to view the
15 million Americans of Spanish descent, including the newly assertive Chicanos,
chiefly in the Southwest. “Chicano describes a beautiful people. Chicano
has a power of its own. Chicano is a unique confluence of histories, cultures,
languages, and traditions. . . . Chicano is a unique people. Chicano is a prophecy
of a new day and a new world.”(7) In the Northeast, particularly in New
York City, almost a million Puerto Ricans, representing the first airborne migration
of a people, stamped their distinctive claims on the consciousness of a nation.(8)

Americans of Eastern Orthodox descent made moves to recover
their heritages. Orientals in San Francisco protested school busing because
integration might threaten their peoples heritage. Chinese and Japanese
all across the country became subjects of curiosity by their non-Oriental contemporaries
who showed interest in Eastern religion, in Yoga or Zen. Nationalist separatist
groups in Quebec gathered around French culture and Catholic faith in neighboring
Canada and provided local examples of a worldwide neo-nationalism.

The racial and ethnic self-consciousness of what had
been called the “minority groups” led to a new sense of peoplehood
among the two groups which together made up the American majority. One of these
clusters came to be called “white ethnic,” its members, “ethnics.”
They took on new group power at a moment when paradoxically, as students of
The Real Majority pointed out, “ethnics are dying out in America and
becoming a smaller percentage of the total population.”(9) The actual
decline was from 26 percent of the population (“foreign stock”)
in 1940 down to an estimated 15 percent in 1970. Austrians, “Baltics,”
Czechoslovakians, German Catholics, Hungarians, Italians, Poles and other heirs
of earlier immigration from Europe were often led to see a common destiny despite
their past histories of separation and often of mutual suspicion or hostility
Most of them were of Roman Catholic back grounds, members of a church which
in its Second Vatican Council taught its adherents to think of themselves in
the image of “The New People of God.”(10) In America they wanted
also to be a people with identity, a people of power.

Finally, there is “one of Americas greatest
and most colorful minority groups.” They came here on crowded ships, were
resented by the natives and had to struggle mightily for every advance they
made against a hostile environment. Despite these handicaps, despite even a
skin color different from the native Americans, this hardy group prospered and,
in prospering, helped build the nation. They fought in her wars, guided her
commerce, developed her transportation, built her buildings. The debt that the
country owes to this particular group of immigrants can never be over-estimated.
In short, like most American minority groups, they made good Citizens.

“The only thing different about the group is that
it is the one traditionally viewed as the American majority”
The minority group just described by Ben J. Wattenberg and Richard M. Scammon
is “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” further qualified today as “native-born
of native parentage.”(11) The acronym and designation WASPNN in the 1960s
represented only about 30 percent of the population. It was divided into 60
percent urban and 40 percent rural, 35 percent southern and 65 percent nonsouthern
communities and included great inner variety. But its critics tended to lump
all WASPs together, and increasing numbers of Americans accepted membership
in this “people.” Among them are large numbers “who happen
to be both Anglo-Saxon and white, but whom none would think to describe in terms
of WASP power structures. For these particular Protestants (in rural Appalachia,
for example) also happen to be exploitable and as invisible as any of Americas
other dispossessed minorities,” and “are sometimes themselves referred
to as a separate people.”(12)

Despite internal variety, at least as late as the 1960s,
“the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant remains the typical American, the model
to which other Americans are expected and encouraged to conform.”(13)
One of the most significant events in the recent study of the peopling of America
has been the growing sense, however, that WASPs are a minority themselves. They
have at least lost statistical bases for providing a national norm for ethnic
self-understanding.

Race, Ethnicity, and Religious History

These good years for peoplehood have given rise to whole
new historical and social inquiries concerning ethnicity. The term (obs.,
rare) once meant “heathendom,” “heathen superstition.”(14)
Today it is coming to refer to participation in “an ethnic groupracial,
religious, or national” in origin.(15) In this essay, racial is
a species of the genus ethnic. People may have authentic or only imaginary
ties to a common place of origin, as Max Weber noted.(16) Thus when a nonchurchgoing
American of Swedish descent is listed as a WASP and accepts that designation,
his part in an “Anglo-Saxon” people relates only to an imagined
common origin with some Englishmen.(17) Two American Italians who share actual
ties to common birthplaces in Europe present a more obvious case for membership
in an ethnic group. Yet in practical life and in the world of the politicians
or analysts the Swedish WASP and the Italian will tend to be treated as equally
legitimate participants in the lives of their people.

The new movements of peoplehood and the expressions of
ethnic and racial consciousnessalmost all of them marked by claims of
“chosenness”caught many Americans off guard. I shall argue
that professional students of religion in America for the most part had become
committed after the middle of the twentieth century to theories of interpretation,
models and paradigms of inquiry which led them to neglect, gloss over, or deliberately
obscure the durable sense of peoplehood in the larger American community. This
also left many members of the fraternity ill prepared to tell the stories of
those who shared new styles of ethnic consciousness.

If that argument can be established, we may properly
speak of ethnicity as the skeleton of religion in America. In a plea for historically
informed ethnic studies and in an account of the history of the neglect of ethnic
groups, Rudolph J. Vecoli says; “Ethnicity in American historiography
has remained something of a family scandal, to be kept a dark secret or explained
away.”(18) This suggests two dictionary images. One is that of “a
skeleton in the closet,” which is “a secret source of shame or pain
to a family or person.” The other is that of “a skeleton at the
banquet,” a “reminder of serious or saddening things in the midst
of enjoyment.” Equally seriously, ethnicity is the skeleton of religion
in America because it provides “the supporting framework,” “the
bare outlines or main features,” of American religion.

When the new particularism was first asserted in the
1960s, students had been enjoying their realization that consensus-minded America
no longer seemed to be “tribal.” (Tribes, to repeat Lord Bryces
observation, possessed distinctive and localized religions. “Religion
appeared to them a matter purely local; and as there were gods of the hills
and gods of the valleys, of the land and of the sea, so each tribe rejoiced
in its peculiar deities, looking on the natives of other countries who worshipped
other gods as Gentiles, natural foes, unclean beings.”)(19) In the midst
of the enjoyment, tribalism reappeared. Black messiahs, black madonnas, the
black Jesus, “the Great Spirit,” the Jewish identification with
the land and soil of Israel and charges that white Gentile America had been
worshiping a localized self-created deity suddenly disturbed the peace. The
issues of ethnicity and racism began to serve as the new occasions for a reexamination
of the assumptions and often hidden biases of students of American religion.

Observers and Advocates of a Common Religion

For the sake of convenience, these students can be divided
into two broadly defined schools. Members of the first seek some sort of spiritual
“sameness,” if not for the whole human family, then at least for
the whole American people. In the Protestant historical community this search
is a kind of enlargement of the nineteenth- century evangelical vision typified
by the words of Lyman Beecher in 1820:

The integrity of the Union demands special exertions
to produce in the nation a more homogeneous character and bind us together
with firmer bonds. . . . Schools, and academies, and colleges, and habits,
and institutions of homogeneous influence . . . would produce a sameness
of views, and feelings, and interests, which would lay the foundation of our
empire upon a rock. Religion is the central attraction which must supply the
deficiency of political affinity and interest.(20) (Emphasis mine)

Another spokesman of this tradition was theologian Charles
Hodge, who in 1829 claimed that Americans were overcoming Europes problem
of disunity by becoming one people, “having one language, one literature,
essentially one religion, and one common soul.”(21)

In the course of time that vision had to be enlarged
so that it could accommodate other Americans though many of these others have
regularly complained ever since that Protestant views of “sameness”
and “essentially one religion, and one common soul” were superimposed
on non-Protestants. Many Roman Catholics, on a somewhat different set of terms,
also affirmed a religious nationalism that transcended their particular creed.(22)

Historian Philip Schaff in 1855 observed continuing immigration
and thought that a national amalgamation was going on. It would blend all European
nationalities into a “Phoenix grave,” as he called it. From it they
would rise to new life and new activity. Yet he still followed ethnocentric
lines: this blending would be “in a new and essentially Anglo-Germanic
form.”(23) Later, Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian who had wanted
the “peopling of America” to be studied for the purposes of national
self-understanding, chose to concentrate on the frontier. He argued that “in
the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and
fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality or characteristics.”(24)
His successors came to expect that a spiritual fusion would accompany the amalgamation
of peoples.

Through the years the seekers of spiritual sameness or
oneness and ethnic fusion or assimilation had to include the physical presence
and spiritual strivings of ever more varied peoples. Those who advocated what
John Dewey in 1934 had called A Common Faith(25) made little secret of
their desire to overcome particularisms of religion, race and class. For some
this desire may have been born of weariness over all tribal-religious warfare;
for others, it grew out of conscious philosophical choices about reality, religion
and nation.

In this spirit at the beginning of this period sociologist
Robin M. Williams, Jr., wrote during 1951 that “Every functioning society
has, to an important degree, a common religion. The possession of a common
set of ideas, rituals, and symbols can supply an overarching sense of unity
even in a society riddled with conflict.”(26) A year later, at the end
of a long book on denominational varieties in American religion, J. Paul Williams
moved beyond Robin Williams in the quest for a common national faith. He spoke
of it as a “societal religion.” Williams favored teaching democracy
as a religious ultimate, and mildly criticized men like Walter Lippmann for
having been content to describe it merely as a “public philosophy”
when it ought to have been termed a religion, and called moreover for “spiritual
integration.”(27)

The dean of American church historians throughout this
period, Sidney E. Mead, gave a generally positive interpretation of “the
religion of the democratic society and nation” (over against “the
religion of the denominations”). While he clearly retained a Lincolnian
sense of judgment over against idolization of the nation, he also agreed with
G. K. Chestertons observation that America is the “nation with the
soul of a church,” and that it was “protected by religious and not
racial selection.”(28) The question of racial or ethnic selection played
only a very small part in Meads thought. He was critical of those who
stressed religious and theological particularity at the expense of the idea
of the nations “spiritual core.” Mead promoted Ronald Osborns
suggestion that “a common type of faith and life . . . common convictions,
a common sense of mission . . . could and should be the goal for Americans.”(29)

One did not have to be a promoter of the search for “sameness,”
“oneness,” or a “common faith” or religion in order
to point to their development after mid-century. Mead singled out Winthrop Hudson.
Will Herberg and myself as three definers of societal religion who withheld
consent from it because of interests in religious and theological particularity.
It was true that during the Elsenhower, Nixon, and later the Reagan eras, many
had been critical about priestly and nationalist forms of civil religion. This
religion may have been sanctioned by a national majority,(30) but many members
of the liberal academic community rejected it.

Most of the intellectuals affirmations of a generalized
American religion came during and shortly after the brief era when John F. Kennedy
seemed to be portraying a new spiritual style for America. It was in this mood
and at this moment that Robert N. Bellah in 1967 attracted a latter-day market
for the term “Civil Religion in America.” This was “at its
best a genuine apprehension of universal and transcendent religious reality
as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through the experience of the
American people.”(31)

The defenses of the common vision as against the particular
contention were based on historical observations of good moments in past American
expressions of religious “sameness.” They also revealed philosophical
commitments toward the higher unity. Most of the defenders overlooked ethnic
and racial factors because these usually reinforced senses of difference. Rudolph
J. Vecoli believes that “the prevailing ideology of the academic profession”
which has been the “prime article of the American creed” has been
a “profound confidence in the power of the New World to transform human
nature.” Vecoli related this to Hector St. John Crevecoeurs eighteenth-century
discernment of a “new race of men,” a “new man,” this
American, who, “leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners,
receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government
he obeys, and the new rank he holds. Here individuals of all nations are melted
into a new race of men.” The result of this faith has been an “assimilationist
ideology.”(32) In the nineteenth century Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others,
kept this faith alive. Let immigrants come: “The energy of Irish, Germans,
Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the European tribesand of the Africans,
and of the Polynesians,will construct a new race, a new religion,
a new state, a new literature.”(33) Regularly throughout American history,
those who failed to be assimilated or who stressed separate racial, ethnic,
or religious identities were embarrassments. Ethnicity became the skeleton in
the closet and had to be prematurely pushed aside and hidden from view.

The Analysts and Defenders of Particularity

The other line of interpretation has been dedicated to
the love of what the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz and the historian
Marc Bloch spoke of as “singular things.”(34 ) Some representatives
of this approach may have shared a concern for or belief in ultimate unity,
but at least they recognized that pluralist terms for life in the civil order
must be found. Against this background in 1958 Father John Courtney Murray,
S.J., made his profound comments about religious pluralism being the human condition,
the script of history, the troubler of the human city.(35)

The historians and analysts who dealt more critically
with “sameness,” “oneness,” and “common”
religion in America after mid-century ordinarily devoted themselves to the religious
shape of this pluralism. Only as the result of the racial upheavals and the
new ethnic consciousnesses which were manifested during the 1960s did some of
them begin to perceive again that ethnicity has been the skeleton, “the
supporting framework” of American religion. These historians and other
observers have seen that racial, ethnic, class, partisan, religious and ideological
conflicts in America have countered or qualified the homogenizing ideals that
earlier held together the “consensus” schools of history. Some of
them began to try to cope specifically with the ethnic pluralism that is also
part of “the human condition.”

Some spokespersons for ethnic or racial pluralism and
separatism have attached ideological commitments to their observations. Out
of myriad possibilities the word of Thomas H. Clancy can be regarded as representative.
Clancy quoted Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was one of the first to speak of
the failure of assimilationist or “melting pot” theories to explain
the American situation. Wrote Moynihan: “The sense of general community
is eroding, and with it the authority of existing relationships, while, simultaneously,
a powerful quest for specific community is emerging in the form of ever more
intensive assertions of racial and ethnic identities.” Adds Clancy: “Black
nationalism caused the white ethnics to remember what they had been taught to
forget, their own origins.” Thus came his own theology of “unlikeness”:

The year 1970 is the date when the drive for group
rights became more important than the struggle for individual rights. (In
the demonstrations and rallies of the future, most signs will bear an ethnic
adjective.). . . For a long time now we have been exhorted to love all men.
We have finally realized that for sinful man this is an unrealistic goal.
The saints and heroes among us will still face the challenge in a spirit of
unyielding despair. The rest of us will try first to love our own kind. This
is the year when brother and sister began to have
a less universal and hence truer meaning.(36) (Emphasis mine)

Of course not all historians who tried to make sense
of racial and ethnic particularism have shared this creed, but it is the common
affirmation of many spokesmen for “differences” over against “sameness”
in civil and religious life.

The two general approaches just described can lie best
studied by reference to several prevailing modelsmany of them defined
by sociologistswhich are regularly used for historical explorations and
contemporary analyses of the shape of American religion.

Sameness through Common Secularity

First, some advocates of “sameness” have
chosen a secular interpretation of American religious life. In this view
the belief is expressed that there will be progressively less religion in society.
Secular people will unite on the basis of some sort of emergent godless, homogenizing,
technological and political scheme. The result will be a global village marked
by nonreligious synthesis for world integration.(37) The “secular theologians”
of the 1960s shared this creed, as did many working historians.(38) In the view
of British sociologist Bryan Wilson, participation in American church life could
itself be called secularization, because on the legal basis of the nations
formal secularity “religious commitment and Church allegiance have
become elements in the American value system.” Wilson presupposed
or observed that “the common values” embodied in religious institutions
and the secular American Way of Life were rather simply congruent with each
other.(39)

Seymour Martin Lipset, also writing in this frame of
mind, dealt in passing with racial and ethnic groups and explained their continuing
appearance in terms of cultural lag: “American religious denominations,
like ethnic groups, have experienced collective upward mobility.” On these
terms,

contemporary Negro religious behavior resembles that
of the nineteenth-century lower status migrant white population. The Catholics
have taken on the coloration of a fundamentalist orthodox religion comparable
in tone and style, if not in theology, to the nineteenth-century evangelical
Protestant sects.(40)

Because distinctive religious symbols have been connected
with almost all the recently recovered movements of peoplehood, racial and ethnic,
their spokesmen would not have been content to see themselves on Lipsets escalator.
They would resist and stress their distinctive symbols (Afro-American, Amerindian,
Chicano, and the like) rather than accommodate themselves to the secular
trend of “the common values” of American life or simply be an element
in the scheme of “upward collective mobility.”

Civil Unity, Religious Privacy

A second line of interpretation is close to the secular
one. It simply says that a persons beliefs are private affairs and thus
have little common or civic consequence. Ideological support for this view is
deep in the American tradition. While Thomas Jefferson supported the idea that
those moral precepts “in which all religions agree” could be supportive
of civil order, he believed differing private religions to be a societal luxury:
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say that there are twenty gods,
or no God.”(41) One could be for sameness and for a common faith independent
of private religious opinions. Religion, said philosopher Alfred North Whitehead
in 1926, is “what the individual does with his own solitariness.”(42)
Religion, for William James in 1903, had meant “the feelings, acts,
and experiences of individual men in their solitude.”(43)

These views find support in the conditions of modern
urban and industrial life, says social theorist Thomas Luckmann. He claims that
“the most revolutionary trait of modern society” is the fact that
“personal identity becomes, essentially, a private phenomenon.”
Religion, now housed in specialized institutions and religious opinions, has
become “a private affair.” Each person selects a world of significance
from a variety of choices. “The selection is based on consumer preference,
which is determined by the social biography of the individual, and similar social
biographies will result in similarchoices.” “Individual religiosity
in modern society receives no massive support and confirmation from the primary
institutions.”(44) Families, sect participation and the like are of some
help, but cannot provide much support for community. Luckmann, unfortunately,
does not dwell on ethnicity or race as religious factors in this context.

The new advocates of peoplehood, however, would contradict
these pictures. “The new tribalism” accuses the American majority
of having forced people to lose their identities by throwing all into the private
sphere. One Indian summed it up long ago : “You are each a one-man tribe.”
Another said: “The question is not how you can Americanize us but how
we can Americanize you.”(45) Whether or not they succeed in the effort,
the new ethnic and racial recoveries are designed to supplant the private interpretation
of identity and religion, and historians at the very least have to explore these
claims at a time when, as Luckmann and others point out, denominational and
sectarian involvement supply little of either.

Religious, Not Ethnic, Pluralism

The third model for religion in America, the pluralist,
moves the discussion to the center of the debate over “sameness”
versus “unlikeness” on national versus ethnic-racial and religious
lines.

The religious pluralist interpretation was born in the
face of the problem of identity and power which increased as ethnic origins
of Americans became progressively more remote and vague. In a sense, it served
to push the skeleton of ethnicity into the closet. Thus Gerhard Lenski in 1961
condensed the thought of Will Herberg, the best-known representative of this
view at mid-century:

Earlier in American history ethnic groups [provided
community and identity] and individuals were able to enjoy this sense of communal
identification and participation as members of the German, Polish, Italian,
and other ethnic colonies established in this country. Today such groups have
largely disintegrated, but many of the needs they served continue to be felt.
In this situation, Herberg argues. Americans are turning increasingly to their
religious groups, especially the three major faiths, for the satisfaction
of their need for communal identification and belongingness.(46)

Herberg himself in 1955 had deplored the “sameness”
or “common religion” schools, but he recognized the presence of
a common faith in the “American Way of Life” as the ultimate. Identification
with Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish religions were paths for reaching it.(47)
E. Digby Baltzell, a student of the WASP establishment, observed in 1964 that
“religious pluralism is replacing the ethnic pluralism of the earlier
era.”48 Historian Arthur Mann, ten years earlier, had seen that in the
matter of pluralism and a single religion of democracy “American Catholicism,
American Protestantism, and American Judaism appear like parallel shoots on
a common stock.”(49) John Cogley, after hosting a tri-faith conference
on pluralism in relation to common religion in 1958, reported with favor on
the response of one participant. This man had learned “that the free so
ciety of America means more than an agreement to disagree; it is posited, rather,
on the idea that Americans will disagree in order to agree.”(50)

Ethnic and racial pluralism, however, did not go away
just be cause religious pluralism was able to serve some social purposes during
the religious revival of the 1950s. Religionists themselves could not agree
on the three-faith interpretation. Thus, Orthodox theologian John Meyendorff
overstated the case somewhat when he said in 1960 that the Orthodox had later
come to be recognized as a fourth “official” American faith.(51)
Lenski, who asked no ethnic questions when he studied Detroit religion, did
find that Herbergs single “Protestantism” had had to be divided
and understood on black/white lines, at least. The religious revival eventually
waned, and many people in a new generation no longer found it possible or desirable
to define themselves in terms of one of three religions. Most of all, ethnic
and racial reassertion did provide identification a community for the “different,”
who were dissenters against a common faith for all Americans.

Many Denominations, One Religion

The fourth interpretation has to be taken more seriously
because of its obvious appropriateness on so many levels. This is an application
to the whole of American Christianity by others of Sidney E. Meads classic
statement that denominationalism is the shape of Protestantism in America.
“Denominationalism is the new American way in Christianity,” wrote
Karl Hertz.(52) Catholicism is also regarded as a denomination by historians.
Judaism, too, is formally denominationalized.

At first glance it may seem to make little sense to say
that the denominational interpretation tended to be favored by those who looked
for a common religion. After all, denominations had been invented in order that
they might protect peoples differing ways of looking at religious ultimates
without permitting society to disintegrate. It turns out that they seem to have
been clever but almost accidental inventions. They served to channel potential
conflict out of possibly violent racial or ethnic spheres into harmless and
irrelevant religious areas. Where are the dead bodies as the result of persistent
denominational conflict?

In effect, argue the viewers of a single American community,
denominationalism works just the opposite way. Two illustrations, one from a
man who favors a secular and the other a religious scheme for seeing America,
in that order, will serve. British sociologist Bryan Wilson, as we noted above,
posited “secularization as the experience of Christianity” in America.
In a long chapter he then discussed “Denominationalism and Secularization.”
Denominationalism is “an aspect of secularization.” Using an interpretation
which stressed class distinctions, Wilson saw “the diversity of denominations
... as the successive stages in the accommodation of life-practice and ethos
of new social classes as they emerged in the national life.” And denominational
diversity “has in itself promoted a process of secularization.”
The religious choices offered people effectively cancel out each other. Denominations
exist and even thrive, but when people accept the ground rules of denominational
civility they telegraph to others that societys ultimate values are being
bartered outside the sects, if anywhere.(53)

Sidney Meads religious interpretation works to
similar effect. While the churches accepted denominationalism as a pattern which
would guarantee their own integrity and relevance, in practice the opposite
has happened. The competitive element in sectarian life has worked against the
truth claims and the plausibility of the denominations. Those who seek religious
affiliation of any sort cannot avoid denominations, though it is true that they
need not necessarily repose their ultimate concerns in denominational formulations.
In this context Mead includes one of his rare references to nationality and
racial backgrounds:

[There has been] a general erosion of interest in the
historical distinction and definable theological differences between the religious
sects. Increasingly the competition among them seems to stem from such non-theological
concerns as nationality or racial background, social status, and convenient
accessibility of a local church. Finally what appears to be emerging as of
primary distinctive importance in the pluralistic culture is the general traditional
ethos of the large families. Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish. If this
trend continues, the competition inherent in the system of church and state
separation, which served to divide the religious groups in the first place,
may work eventually to their greater unity.(54)

By the end of the paragraph, then, the ethnic skeleton
has been placed back in the closet, and trends toward higher unity prevail in
Meads world.

The matter was not resolved so easily, however. Denominational
distinctiveness remained durable, as Charles Y. Glock in 1965 showed in an essay
on “The New Denominationalism.”(55) Glock, basing his assertions
on his findings of a population sample in California, disagreed with both Will
Herberg on the theme of a “common religion” and with Robert Lee
on there being a “common core Protestantism.” Glock is probably
correct: great numbers of Americans do want to be loyal to their denominations.
The interdenominational Consultation on Church Union, which would cluster and
merge denominations, attracts little support. Non- and inter- and para- and
counter-denominational, ecumenical ventures do not prosper. Despite this, it
would be easy to overstress the importance of denominational pluralism.

For one thing, the denominations are divided down the
center in a kind of two-party system. The differences on vital issues (such
as racial and ethnic matters) are expressed within and not between denominations,
as Jeffrey Hadden demonstrated in 1969.(56) What is more, on matters of deepest
significance, even where denominational names have been useful, denominational
designations reveal little. For example, black religion was denominationalized,
but sectarian bonds have meant almost nothing across racial lines. Millions
of southern blacks have been Baptist, but there was until recently almost no
contact between them and Southern Baptists, the largest white Protestant group
in America. The racist has looked at the Negro as a black, not as a Methodist
or a Protestant. The black American has had little choice between church bodies
when he wished to look for differences in attitudes among them. “Denomination
mattered little, for support of the racist creed ran the gamut from urban Episcopalians
to country Baptists,” wrote David Reimers concerning the late-nineteenth-century
situation.(57)

Even among whites, ethnic lines usually undercut denominational
interests. WASPs, for instance, once established a line-crossing mission to
“Catholic Immigrants.” Theodore Abel wrote in 1933 that “in
general the work among Catholic immigrants is carried on with the aim of promoting
Americanization and breaking down the isolation of immigrants from American
society by bringing them into the fellowship of the Protestant Church.”
In the fifty years before 1933 between fifty and one hundred million dollars
had been spent on the cause. But

The mission enterprise has failed to realize the main
purpose for which it was instituted. It has failed to accomplish to any significant
degree the evangelization of Catholic immigrants and their descendants, and
it has not achieved the control that it sought of directing the process of
their adaptation to American life. No movement toward Protestantism has taken
place as a result of these missionary efforts.(58)

That report dealt with a half century during which Protestants
had been notably missionary, expansionist and devoted toward transforming remote
churches. But at home, ethnic factors served to frustrate such motives or achievements.
Black, Indian, Chicano, white ethnic and other movements of peoplehood found
neither the denominational shape nor the nation s soul to be as effective for
promoting identity and power as they found race or ethnicity, which was stillor
againthe skeleton or supporting framework for their religion.

A Common Religion

The fifth major line of interpretation has been implied
throughout. In it “sameness,” “oneness,” and a “common
faith” found their home in a societal or civil religion that informed,
infused and inspired virtually the whole population. How does it fare in a time
of new peoplehood or “new tribalism”? Its expression is complicated
and compromised. At the very least it must be said that the racial or ethnic
group “refracts the national cultural patterns of behavior and values
through the prism of its own cultural heritage,” as Milton Gordon put
it.(59) The black child in the ghetto or the Amerindian youngster may engage
in ceremonies of civil religion. But they may think of something quite different
from the world of the white childs Pilgrims or Founders when they sing
of a “land where my fathers died.” This is the land where their
fathers were enslaved or killed. The symbols of societal religion can be used
in more ways than one by separate groups.

Most of the movements of racial and ethnic consciousness
have found it important to oppose militantly the symbols of civil religion,
Historian Vincent Harding in 1968 defined Black Power itself as “a repudiation
of the American culture-religion that helped to create a it and a quest for
a religious reality more faithful to our own experience.”(60) An Indian
does not want the white mans religion. The Chicano detects the Protestant
work ethic in the calls for his participation in a common civil religion. The
white ethnic at his American Legion hall relates to civil religious symbols
in a different way than does the Jewish member of the Americans for Democratic
Action. The young WASP countercultural devotee rejects all American civil religion.
The delineations of civil religion themselves are never universal in origin,
content, ethos, or scope; they are informed by the experience of the delineators
own ethnic subcommunities. Robert N. Bellahs and Sidney E. Meads
views are unexplainable except as expressions of particular WASP traditions.
Orientals, Africans, Latin Americans ordinarily would neither bring Bellahs
and Meads kinds of questions nor find their kinds of answers in civil
religion. As British observer Denis Brogan wrote concerning Bellahs essay,
“The emblems, the metaphors, the note (as Newman might have
put it) of public civil religion is Protestant, even when those symbols are
used by Catholics, Jews, Greek Orthodox.”(61) It is precisely this feature
that has led to attempts at rejection of civil religion and “common faith”
on the part of so many ethnic and racial groups.

In summary, it would appear that the five main models
for interpreting American religious “sameness”the secular,
the private, the pluralist, the denominational, and the common-religiousapply
appropriately only to the white and largely generalized Protestant academic
circles where they originated. Other ethnic-racial-religious complexes can be
only occasionally and partially interpreted through these.

Ethnic and Racial Themes Reintroduced

To suggest that ethnic and racial themes have to be reintegrated
into the schemes for posing historians questions was not to say that these
should displace the others. The secular tendencies in America will probably
not be successfully countered by the new religious practices of minority groups.
Many people can find identity in the private sphere without explicit reference
to ethnic and racial religious motifs. Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism may
long serve to identify practitioners of a common American religion. Denominationalism
may indeed be the shape, and civil religion the soul, of American religionjust
as ethnicity is its skeleton or supporting framework. But as the most neglected
theme until recently, racial and ethnic particularity deserves compensatory
interest and inquiry.

Numerous benefits could result from such an effort. Concentration
on religious dimensions of peoplehood could lead to a more accurate portraying
of the way things have beenthat is always the first goal of the historian.
Historians in the once-majority traditions, WASP and white ethnic combined,
can re-explore their own assumptions and may be able to discern the ethnic aspects
in what they had earlier regarded as their universal points of view. The theories
seeking “sameness” and “oneness” tended to be based
on a kind of optimistic and voluntaristic spirit. Ethnic-racial recovery should
help historians deal more adequately with the faded, pre-destined, tragic and
even violent elements in religion in America.

Wasp Histories as Ethnic Expressions

In any case, WASP and white ethnic American historians
would be able critically to revisit their own older traditions, traditions which
were once racially and ethnically self-conscious, for better and for worse.
When WASP is seen not as the norm but as an ethnic minority among minorities,
the racial special pleading of the fathers appears in a different light. Robert
Baird, whom many regard as the first historian of American religion, in 1843
insisted that “our national character is that of the Anglo-Saxon race,”
and he ranked other ethnic groups downward from Anglo-Saxon.(62) Baird began
his history with reference to the differences of Indian, Negro and other non-Anglo-Saxon
peoples and kept them in mind consistently as he measured them in the light
of his own racial norm.

Not only WASPs were particularists. Bairds counterpart,
John Gilmary Shea, the father of American Catholic historiography, was a spokesman
for the Irish minority, and Catholic history has been consistently marked by
ethnic distinctives.(63) Philip Schaff, a Continental “outsider,”
had to invent artificial ways to blend his German-Swiss background with the
Anglo-American dominant strain. Daniel Dorchester in 1890 criticized the German
and Irish influx as people of “low habits and ideas, retaining supreme
allegiance to a foreign pontiff, or controlled by radical, rationalistic, materialistic,
or communistic theories. . . . Can Old World subjects be transformed into New
World citizens?”(64) Even Leonard Woolsey Bacon, a man of ecumenical temperament
and a devotee of religious “sameness,” spoke during 1898 in terms
of “masterful races” in American white Protestantism.(65)

Josiah Strongshall the historians claim him?was
explicitly racist in his accounting of American religion in the 1880s and 1890s.
For Strong, the Anglo-Saxons religion was “more vigorous, more spiritual,
more Christian than that of any other.” It was destined to “dispossess
many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder, until, in a very
true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind.”

If I do not read amiss, this powerful race will move
down into Mexico, down upon Central and South America, out upon the island
of the sea, over upon Africa and beyond. And can anyone doubt that the result
of this competition will be the survival of the fittest?(66)

The themes of WASP ethnicity and superiority which had
been explicit in the nineteenth century became implicit and taken for granted
in the twentieth. The assimilationist ideal took over. In 1923 Peter Mode could
write that “American Christianity has ... no racial coloring and its Americanization
as yet has been a process void of racialism,” a suggestion about America
that would be incomprehensible to most of the world. Instead, said Mode, American
Christianity has taken its character by having been “frontierized.”(67)
Joining the frontierizing-sameness school was William Warren Sweet, who dealt
at length with slavery, but most of whose energies were devoted to the white
Protestant mainline churches as normal and normative. Sidney E. Mead changed
the topic to denominationalism and a common national religion without picking
up much interest in non-WASP religion.

On the other hand, Robert Handy s A Christian America:
Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities (68) is one of the first important
attempts by a WASP to come to terms with the WASP particularism which once had
paraded itself as universalism. Handy stresses ethnic, racial and other conflict-inducing
questions over against the interpretations which derived from the mid-century
“sameness” and “oneness” schools.

The Future of Tribal Confederation

Even though the future is not the historians province,
it is sometimes asked whether it is worth scholars efforts to retool so
that they can henceforth include the ethnic and racial questions. The assimilating,
blending, melting processes do remain and are accelerating. Yet ever new immigrationsAsian,
Islamic, Hispaniccome to complicate the visions of “sameness”
with which some would cope with pluralism. It would seem as if the plot will
thin and thicken at the same time. While “ethnicity” can be a periodic
fad, the attempt to understand the bonds of religion and peoplehood should continue
to quicken anyone who would address issues of American pluralism, past and present.
As the ethnic factor remains strong, certainly there will be times of crisis
when a sort of “tribal confederation” will be instinctively and
informally convoked so various peoples can get together and affirm their common,
not their separate, symbols. The historians can then stand ready to interpret
both the past interplay between conflicting particularities and homogenizing
concordant elements in national life and the considerable assets and liabilities
of each.

Whatever happens, however, it seems clear that not all
human needs can be met by secular interpretation and private faith, by tri-faith
or conventional denominational life, or by a common national religion. New particularisms
will no doubt continue to arise, to embody the hopes of this “people of
peoples.” Meanwhile, when representatives of the oldest of American peoples,
the American Indian, assert that they wish to Americanize the rest of the nation
and that they would like to teach their fellow citizens the merits of life in
tribes, these other citizens could appropriately reply: “In some senses,
we never left home.”

2. Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), popularized the concept of peoplehood,
which is the “sense” of an ethnic, racial, or religious group. The
word turns up frequently in literature on ethnicity and new movements. Sometimes
these movements, among them Womens Liberation, the New Left, “the
counterculture,” and the like, speak of themselves in the terms of “peoplehood,”
but this essay restricts itself to study of those groups which have at least
a minimal claim on some sort of common ethnic origin and orientation. Significantly,
the term worked its way into Websters New International Dictionary
during the 1960s; it did not appear in the second edition (1960) but is
present in the third (1969): “Peoplehood: the quality or state of constituting
a people: also: awareness of the underlying unity that makes the individual
a part of the people.”

3. The literature on black religion is rapidly expanding;
Hart M. Nelsen, Raytha L. Yokley, and Anne K. Nelson, The Black Church in
America (New York: Basic Books, 1971) is an excellent anthology on every
major aspect of the subject. The suggestion that 1968 was a watershed year in
black religious consciousness appears in this book, pp. 17ff. Cleage is quoted
on p. 18 and Bishop Herbert B. Shaw, speaking of ties to Asia and Africa, on
p. 21. James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: J.
B. Lippincott, 1970), is a representative charge that most of what had previously
been seen to be a generalized and universal theology in America is actually
an expression of “whiteness.” See also James J. Gardiner, S. A.
and J. Deotis Roberts, Sr., Quest for a Black Theology (Philadelphia:
Pilgrim Press, 1971).

4. Vine Deloria, We Talk, You Listen (New York:
Macmillan, 1970) was a widely noticed expression of new American Indian assertiveness;
it included an explicit suggestion that our impersonal, homogenized America
should relearn the tribal model from the original Americans.

6. Arthur A. Cohen, The Myth of the Judeo-Christian
Tradition (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), was written to help “break
through the crust of harmony and concord which exists between Judaism and Christianity”
and to help “destroy that in both communities which depends upon the other
for authentication” (p. vii). Cohen believes that the myth of the common
tradition was largely devised in America in the face of a secular religiosity;
it induced two faiths to “join together to reinforce themselves in the
face of a common disaster” (p. xix).

7. Armando B. Rendon, Chicago Manifesto (New York:
Macmillan, 1971), uses Rgures (p. 38) from a survey taken in November, 1969;
9.2 million persons claiming Spanish descent would represent 4.7 percent of
the population. Three-quarters of this number were native born; the rest were
immigrants, with half coming from Mexico. See also p. 325.

8. Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, Puerto Rican Americans:
The Meaning of a Migration (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971)
is a brief but comprehensive survey of the situation of this minority.

9. Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg, The Real
Majority (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970), p. 66. Andrew M. Greeley, Why
Cant They Be Like Us?Americas White Ethnic Groups (New
York: E. P. Dutton, 1971) introduces this conglomeration of hitherto separate
ethnic forces. He also points to the fact that in part because its members spoke
English and were Catholic the large Irish immigrant group does not fit easily
into “the white ethnic/white Anglo-Saxon Protestant” combination.
Nor, it might be added, did Germans and Scandinavian Protestants, who did not
speak English.

10. References to the church as “the new people
of God” can be found throughout Walter M. Abbott. S. J., ed., The Documents
of Vatican II (New York: Guild Press, American Press, Assoc. Press, 1966).
In actual practice, ethnocentrism, competing ethnic subcommunities, and isolated
or rival “national” parishes throughout American history have blurred
the vision of their being a single “people of God.”

12. David Edwin Harrell, Jr., White Sects and Black
Men in the Recent South (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press,
1971), p. viii.

13. Lewis M. Killian, The Impossible Revolution
(New York: Random House, 1968) p. 18. Richard L. Means, in The Christian
Century, 78 (August 16, 1961), pp. 979-80, began to discuss the significance
of Anti-Protestant Prejudice, a theme which subsequently received increasing
attention, and which may serve to cause more WASPs to affirm the self-designation
they had once shunnedif the experience of other more obvious victims of
group prejudice is to be repeated in this instance. See also Peter Schrag, “The
Decline of the Wasp,” in Harpers Magazine, April 1970. While
the WASPs “still hold power, they hold it with less assurance and with
less legitimacy than at any time in history. . . . One can almost define their
domains by locating the people and institutions that are chronically on the
defense. . . . For the first time, any sort of settlement among competing interests
is going to have to do more than pay lip service to minorities and to the pluralism
of styles, beliefs, and cultures. . . . America is not on the verge of becoming
two separate societies, one rich and white, the other poor and black. It is
becoming, in all its dreams and anxieties, a nation of outsiders for whom no
single style or ethnic remains possible. . . . We will now have to devise ways
of recognizing and assessing the alternatives. The mainstream is running thin.”

14. This definition and two subsequent definitions of
skeleton are from the Oxford English Dictionary.

15. Charles H. Anderson, White Protestant Americans:
From National Origins to Religious Group (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1971), p. viii. “Every American, as we shall use the term, is a member
or potential member of an ethnic groupracial, religious, or national in
origin.”

16. See Max Weber, “Ethnic Croups,” trans.
Ferdinand Kolegar, in Talcott Parsons et al., Theories of Society, vol.
1 (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1961), pp. 305ff. “Any aspect or cultural
trait, no matter how superficial, can serve as a starting point for the familiar
tendency to monopolistic closure.” “Almost any kind of similarity
or contrast of physical type and of habits can induce the belief that a tribal
affinity or disaffinity exists between groups that attract or repel each other.”
“The belief” in tribal kinship, regardless of whether it has any
objective foundation, can have important consequences especially for the formation
of a political community. Those human groups that entertain a subjective belief
in their common descentbecause of similarities of physical type or of
customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migrationin
such a way that this belief is important for the continuation of non-kinship
communal relationship we shall call ethnic groups, regardless of
whether an objective blood relationship exists or not.” “Behind
all ethnic diversities there is somehow naturally the notion of the chosen
people, which is nothing else but a counterpart of status differentiation
translated into the plane of horizontal coexistence. The idea of a chosen people
derives its popularity from the fact that it can be claimed to an equal degree
by any and every member of the mutually despising groups.”

17. Anderson, pp. 43ff, locates Swedes with WASPs. “They
have been granted WASP status on the basis of their successful adaptation to
Anglo-Saxon America. In a sense even today Scandinavians are second-class WASPs;
nevertheless, Scandinavians know that it is better to be a second-class WASP
than a non-WASP in American society.”

18. Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Ethnicity: A Neglected
Dimension of American History,” in Herbert J. Bass, The State of American
History (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 70ff, sets the stage for the present
essay on religious historiography.

19. Quoted in Carlton J. H. Hayes, Nationalism:
A Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 20f. Hayes provides one of the best
analyses of the dimensions of national cultural religions in chap. 12, pp. 154ff.

20. Lyman Beecher, Address of the Charitable Society
for the Education of Indigent Pious Young Men for the Ministry of the Gospel
(Concord, Mass., 1820), p. 20.

23. Philip Schaff, America: A Sketch of Its Political,
Social, and Religious Character (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 1961), p. 51.

24. Quoted by Vecoli, p. 75.

25. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1934). While the book uses the term Cod, it is nontheistic
and advocates an imaginatively based synthesis or unification of values in which
the many take part.

27. J. Paul Williams, What Americans Believe and How
They Worship (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 477-592. The first edition
appeared in 1952.

28. See especially Sidney E. Mead, “The Nation
with the Soul of a Church,” Church History, vol. 36, no. 3 (September
1967), pp. 262ff. Williams quotes Mead with favor, p. 479, in reference to the
religion of the democratic society versus the religion of the denominations.

29. Sidney E. Mead, “The Post-Protestant Concept
and Americas Two Religions,” in Robert L. Ferm, Issues in American
Protestantism: A Documentary History from the Puritans to the Present (Garden
City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1969), pp.387f. Following Paul Tillichs distinction,
it might be said that Mead affirmed “the catholic substance” in
a common national religion because he trusted the presence of “the protestant
principle” of prophetic protest. Those Mead criticized tended to stress
“the protestant principle” even where they affirmed the common faith
because they feared that its “catholic substance” could be idolized
or imposed on people.

31. Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,”
reprinted in Cutler, pp. 331ff., especially p. 346. The paper was first presented
at a conference in May 1966, before the liberal academic community had largely
turned its back on the Johnson administration. After the escalation of the Vietnam
War, the rise of the New Left and the intensification of Black Power movements,
this community was somewhat less congenial to the expressions of a national
religion once again.

32. Vecoli, pp. 74f. Crevecoeur first published his
Letters from an American Farmer in 1782.

34. Marc Bloch, The Historians Craft (New
York: Vintage, 1964), p. 8. Such a “thrill of learning singular things”
was not characteristic of Leibnitz, who tried to transcend variety and pluralism.
Over against this, William James posed A Pluralistic Universe (New York:
Longmans, Green, 1909), which may be seen as the philosophical grandfather of
the American schools which tolerate or encourage particularisms.

37. Secular and religious approaches to world integration
are sketched by W. Warren Wagar, The City of Man: Prophecies of a World Civilization
in Twentieth-Century Thought (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963).

38. For a review of secular theologians positions,
see Martin E. Marty, “Secularization in the American Public Order,”
in Donald A. Giannella, Religion and the Public Order, no. 5 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1969), pp. 33f, and “Secular Theology as a Search
for the Future,” in Albert Schlitzer, C. S. C., ed., The Spirit and
Power of Christian Secularity (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1969), pp. 1ff.

40. Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The
United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York: Basic
Books, 1963), pp. 151f.

41. Jefferson to J. Fishback, September 27, 1809, in
Albert Ellery Bergh, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, 1905),
vol. 12, 314-16; the second reference is quoted by Anson Phelps Stokes, Church
and State in the United States (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950), vol.
1, 335.

44. Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem
of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 97f., 105f.
While Jefferson, Whitehead, and James often advocated private limitations of
religion, Luckmann merely observes it and regards it as a burden for moderns
seeking an identity.

47. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay
in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), pp.
88-102. Lenski and Herberg did not regard the common religion of America with
favor. Among those who did were Horace M. Kallen, in Secularism Is the Will
of God (New York: Twayne, 1954) and Duncan J. Hewlett, though they treated
secularism or humanism as The Fourth American Faith (New York: Harper
and Row, 1964), which still had to contend for place with Protestantism, Catholicism
and Judaism. Samuel A. Mueller, “The New Triple Melting Pot: Herberg Revisited,”
in Review of Religious Research, vol. 13, no. 1 (Fall 1971), suggests
that a new set of categories should be “white Christian, white non-Christian,
and black.” He bases this on a sociological study of lines between these
and Herbergs three groups in the matters of “marriage, friendship,
residence, occupations, and politics.”

67. Peter Mode, The Frontier Spirit in American Christianity
(New York: Macmillan, 1923), pp. 6, 7, 14. Mode-Sweet-Mead represent a University
of Chicago succession which is most familiar to me. See also William Warren
Sweet. The Story of Religion in America (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1930); another student in this tradition, along with Robert T. Handy (see n.
68), is Winthrop S. Hudson, whose Religion in America (New York: Scribners,
1965) pioneered at least in it sense of proportion, since it devoted much attention
to black Protestantism, Judaism and other non-WASP religious groups.

68. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. For another
attempt to isolate WASP history and to treat WASPs as an ethnic group, see Martin
E. Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New
York: Dial, 1970).